Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I revived a game I abandoned 5yo ago and released it for free today
A charming pixel art platform adventure, reminiscent of the good old 16-bit days. Served as the foundation for the retro-platformer Tiny Thor.
A developer has released a game they abandoned five years ago, now available for free on Steam. The game is intended for players looking for casual entertainment. What distinguishes this release is that it represents a… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I revived a game I abandoned 5yo ago and released it for free today launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IG
I was at FB/Meta from late 2013 to early 2023, mostly working in the compiler/runtime spaces. I got hit in the spring 2023 layoff wave. I immediately started making games in my newfound free time (a lifelong interest, and I even worked in AA(A?) back ca. ~2000), and in October 2023 I stumbled upon the idea of a roguelike pachinko/plinko game inspired by Luck Be A Landlord. Things snowballed quickly, I started talking to publishers, then worked like crazy through all of 2024, almost the hardest I've ever worked in my career, and launched the game in December 2024. It's sold…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 2
A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 4IS
2012 · ektomarch.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world · its alternatives →
- 6
I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7IS
Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I've just reached beta in my game BoxByte Lyte. -What is it- It's a free 3d arcade game for hardcore players that uses color matching in interesting ways. Also it's a one button game, well movement and one button. Cool huh? The final release will be free too. -What I need- This is a very challenging game, so I really need to balance the difficulty so that it's still hard but not impossible. It would be great just to hear your experiences of the game and how far in it you got. -Where can I report bugs?-…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 8
Repo here: https://github.com/ariroffe/personal-website
2022 · arielroffe.quest · its alternatives →
- 9
Help move the boxes to their happy place.
2020 · victorqribeiro.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 10
- 11
I've been working on Athena Crisis for about two years, and full time for the past 9 months. The game is entirely built from scratch using React and CSS without a game engine. It runs anywhere, including the Steam Deck. You can even use a gamepad on the landing page to play! Previously the landing page had a video of the game but my goal was to always just put the actual game on the website. I merged the landing page into the game's monorepo, added the game's React components, and boom – the video was replaced with a playable version of Athena Crisis. Of course, the real game has tons more…
2024 · athenacrisis.com · its alternatives →
- 12MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 13IM
2022 · room101.ironwill.ai · its alternatives →
- 14IM
Hi, I've been developing an HTML5 MMORPG game where people can submit code to play a game, like collect items, destroy defense towers or kill monsters, etc.. I've been working on this for over 1.5 yrs (all my spare time) and now it's ready for preview, does anyone want to try it out? It's mostly opensource (and the rest will be opensource sooner or later) Please access it with PC, it's an HTML5 game: https://bytelegend.com/ I really want it to expand to more languages, but right now I've only finished Java part. I wonder if anyone can help me with other languages. Besides, I'm…
2022 · bytelegend.com · its alternatives →
- 15IM
Hi, As a 8-bit C64 game coder in eaarly 90ties and currently mostly FE-focused dev, decided to give a go to a simple retro game archive. This is purely fun project - so i decided to post it to HN, mayne it'll resonate :)
2023 · polishpixels.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Spiderdash▲42I made this game ten years ago without framework. It took my free time for months to develop. I find myself having fun playing it today. Maybe some will enjoy
2023 · spiderdash.standupweb.net · its alternatives →
- 17
An RPG with random generated elements.
2015 · play.google.com · its alternatives →
- 18
- 19IR
Recently, I managed to recover some of my earliest work from the ZX Spectrum era from an old audio cassette. It is a mini-game, that I created as a teen, called "Atomix," written in BASIC with a mix of Z80 assembly — some of which I coded myself, while other parts were disassembled from existing games. I put the game in an modern emulator and recorded a screencast. See the video in my linkedin post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7288665...
2025 · its alternatives →
- 20
Hey HN! I'm so excited to open source Athena Crisis under the MIT-License and fund contributions to the game and the genre. If you like the game and want to support its development, please check it out on Steam or on athenacrisis.com.
2024 · cpojer.net · its alternatives →
- 21
A retro game engine for Python. Contribute to kitao/pyxel development by creating an account on GitHub.
22d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22IM
2020 · freetogame.com · its alternatives →
- 23
A pixelart action platformer for Android.
2015 · play.google.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hello HN, I'm sharing a little open-source utility I wrote recently. I'm a huge fan of Brendan Gregg's "BPF Performance Tools" book. However, every time I SSH into a fresh server, most of the diagnostic tools aren't installed there and installing them can be really annoying. I decided to use Nix package manager and LLMs to make this process straightforward. My utility first downloads a "toolbox" of Linux utilities (built with Nix), runs Brendan Gregg's famous "60-second Linux analysis" playbook and then summarizes the results with an LLM. So "60-second Linux analysis" now becomes a single…
Mar 2026 · quesma.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →